Funding Archives - Page 6 of 8

Denver Startup Plink Raises $3M Series A From Grotech Ventures

Denver loyalty and rewards startup Plink has been on a roll lately. Back in June we brought you this story about how they partnered with TangoCard to bring their rewards beyond Facebook credits and that strategy has seemed to pay off.

Today they’ve announced that they’ve closed a $3 million dollar series A round entirely from mid-atlantic (VA & MD) based Grotech Ventures.

Plink began as a company that would take offline businesses and incentivize their customer base with something simple, and easy that millions would benefit from, Facebook credits. While only offering Facebook credits they rapidly ramped up their brick and mortar customer base, until the recent transition to rewards from TangoCard partners. The company has reported that they will use the new funding to continue accelerating development of their offline program. Of course they will also ramp up member acquisition and their marketing efforts.

“Connecting online-to-offline is a challenge for marketers,” said Plink Co-founder and CEO Peter Vogel. “Plink bridges that gap and Grotech Ventures’ investment brings nearly 20 years of successful experience, an enormous amount of industry know-how, insight, and strategic guidance to propel Plink to the next level.”

“For consumers, Plink is a no-brainer,” said Joe Zell, general partner of Grotech Ventures. “Why wouldn’t someone join and get rewards for going out to their favorite places? There’s no extra card to carry or steps a consumer has to take. In addition, Plink has already proven that huge national restaurant brands love the model and they’re already seeing significant increases in consumer purchases.”

Some of the largest fast food establishments are already on board with Plink including Arby’s, Dunkin Donuts and Burger King.

Large chains have embraced Plink because it doesn’t require any changes to their existing point-of-sale infrastructure, does not require staff training, Plink does all the marketing and the restaurants only pay a percentage of the sales that Plink drives. Initial results have shown that Plink members are spending 65 percent more per month at partner restaurants than they were prior to joining Plink. It’s a risk-free, 100 percent turn-key model for national chains and Plink will soon be adding large retail and travel partners.

Plink has raised $4 million to date.

Linkage:

Check out Plink here

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Idaho: Treasure Valley Angel Fund Takes Over Where Boise Angel Fund Left Off

While Boise Idaho isn’t synonymous with startups they do have quite a few great tech companies on their hands. Part of that was because of the $1 million dollar Boise Angel Fund which has recently shut down.

A new group of angels have banded together in Idaho to again spur innovation, startups and small businesses. The Treasure Valley Angel Fund has announced that they’ve raised $750,000 of the $2 million dollars they are looking to invest in Idaho startups.

“The Treasure Valley Angel Fund is the kind of jobs-and opportunity-creating machine that will help accelerate Idaho’s economic growth through the skill and experience of proven business leaders and the creative energy of entrepreneurs,” Gov. Butch Otter said in a news release.

Earl Sullivan who is the chairman of “The Core” a medical technology industry cluster in Meridian, is backing the Treasure Valley Angel Fund and is the interim chairmen however he has already said that he’s turned over control of the fund to the members.

“Members of the Core, who are committed to building out a core competency in Idaho in health care, health research and innovation, are energized by the response of investors to grow the base of capital on which Idaho’s growing economy is built,” Sullivan said to the Idaho Statesman.

Loon Creek Capital will administer the Treasure Valley Angel Fund. Kevin Learned, the co-founder of Loon Creek and also the co-founder of Learned Mahn, one of Idaho’s first software companies said: “Idahoans have known for more than a century when to make an investment to prime the pump, and they have done it again,”

Linkage:

For more on the Treasure Valley Angel Fund Click Here

Source: The Idaho Statesman

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Boston Startup: DraftKings Raises $1.4 Million Dollars For Their Fantasy Sports Platform

If you’re into fantasy sports for real money you may want to check out DraftKings if you haven’t already. The hot Boston startup just raised $1.4 million dollars in venture capital to expand their marketing efforts and beyond Major League Baseball. They plan to add football, basketball and ice hockey to their already lucrative sports gaming business.

The legal, money betting fantasy sports startup offers same day settlement of cash prizes. They operate in 44 states excluding: Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana and Vermont where it’s not legal to participate in online “gambling”.

The $1.4 million dollar seed round was led by Atlas Venture. Boston Seed Capital, Hub Angels, Angel Street Capital and other private investors also participated in the round.

Thirty-two million people play fantasy sports in the US and Canada, and two-thirds of all fantasy sports leagues involve fees and payouts that are typically managed offline by a designated member of the league. DraftKings simplifies the process by handling financial transactions through its site while collecting a commission on every stakes game.

“While fantasy sports have been around for 50 years, online daily fantasy sports is much younger and growing rapidly. The sector is ripe for innovation via an analytical approach to marketing and customer relationship management,” said Jason Robins, DraftKings CEO and co-founder.

“There’s an opportunity for a daily fantasy sports platform to dominate the current field,” said Ryan Moore, partner at Atlas Venture. “With a deep understanding of successful gaming franchises, and expertise in customer acquisition and retention, the team at DraftKings has the potential to quickly achieve the top position in this market.”

Sports fans are flocking to DraftKings because they’ve cut away some of the fat associated with other fantasy sports sites. This way DraftKings can focus on players’ favorite aspects of fantasy gaming:

1. Daily fantasy sports games. No more season long commitments.

2. A community at the ready to play. No more hustling to round up a league.

3. On demand draft. Players can pick a new team whenever they choose, which is much more fun than scrounging to substitute mid-season.

4. Players are never “out of contention”. No more going an entire season with a poorly performing team. Engagement remains high for the duration.

5. Daily payouts. For those games involving financial stakes, players can collect immediately.

6. Onsite settlement. DraftKings handles the transactions and distribution of proceeds, freeing up precious administrative time.

“Playing fantasy sports should be fun and easy. Our approach is data-driven, but those themes underlay every customer-facing decision we make,” said Matt Kalish, COO and co-founder.

Linkage:

Check out DraftKings here at draftkings.com

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Raleigh Startup: Sprout Scores $20M Round For Female Viagra

If you’re in a relationship with a woman, whether it’s a long term relationship, marriage, or even same sex marriage, and your female partner tells you she’s not in the mood, a lot, it may not be you after all. A Raleigh NC based startup called Sprout may actually be able to help you and your partner, down the road if they get FDA approval.

In 1998 Pfizer rocked the market when they introduced Viagra the first commercially available medication for men with erectile dysfunction. Viagra spawned a new category of prescription medications that have now turned into a $5 billion dollar industry. No one thought about women though.

Female sexual dysfunction, or low sexual desire is an actual problem. An Illinois based company called BioSante Pharmaceuticals suggests that as many as 43% of women between the ages of 18 and 59 experience some kind of female sexual dysfunction. The company made that statement based on figures published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They project that female sexual dysfunction could turn into a $2 billion dollar a year industry.

Sprout, is working toward FDA approval for fibanserin a compound developed to treat hypoactive sexual disorder which is a form of female sexual dysfunction. Sprout purchased the compound from German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The FDA denied Boehringer approval of fibanserin in 2010.

Sprout’s Chief Commercial Officer Cynthia Whitehead thinks that Sprout will be more successful with FDA approval. Whiethead told WRAL that there were “flawed metrics” in the first FDA submission by Boehringer. She went on to say “It will be a review issue,” she said. “We feel we have all of the data we need.”

Whitehead also said that Boehringer’s submission for fibarnserin was as a depression treatment.

Sprout has received a $20 million dollar angel investment from 59 angel investors, the same group of investors that backed Slate Pharmaceuticals which was the company that spun out Sprout. The company will use the money to support their operations and growth. They will also use the money to hire regulatory personnel and scientists to work on the resubmission of the drug in 2013.

Source: WRAL

Kansas City Startup: Divshot Wins $25k in crowdfunder’s Crowdstart Contest In LA

Los Angeles based crowdfunding startup crowdfunder just completed their first Crowdstart contest. The seven week contest drew over 700 submissions, 74 contestants and 10 finalists. Kansas City startup Divshot emerged as the winner, taking home the $25,000 prize.

While we all know that the JOBS act was passed earlier this year and crowdfunding for equity won’t be implemented until the end of the year or early next year, Crowdfunder didn’t want to wait to start helping startups raise invaluable funds. For the prize money they teamed with Right Side Capital Management.

Divshot is a company that provides web designers with drag and drop tools for rapidly prototyping websites and designs. The concept was born just 90 days ago at a Startup Weekend event in Kansas City, home to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, who is the major backing behind the Startup Weekend brand of events.

“Opportunities for local fundraising are limited, not just here in Kansas City but everywhere around the country,” said Jake Johnson, Divshot co-founder. “Crowdfunder will enable us to tap into capital, education and resources through their online platform. What’s good for us is good for our local economy. We’re excited to be part of making a positive economic impact here in our own backyard.”

Now that the Los Angeles contest has come to a close, crowdfunder has just kicked off their Crowdstart Las Vegas contest. This time though, half a million dollars is up for grabs. The contest kicks off tonight at Startup Weekend in Vegas.

“We’re thrilled to be able to support entrepreneurs and innovation here and throughout the country,” said crowdfunder CEO Chance Barnett. “Divshot is just the beginning of the kind of nurturing, education and support that crowdfunder intends to provide. That’s why we’re hosting another startup contest, Crowdstart Las Vegas, which kicks off today at Vegas Startup Weekend where $500,000 is up for grabs by the Vegas Tech Fund.”

Linkage:

Check out Crowdfunder here

Check out Divshot here

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Cultivation Capital Invests In Two More St. Louis Startups: Yurbuds & Systematic Revenue

Two weeks ago we got a chance to meet Rick Holton of Holton Capital, Arch Angels, and Cultivation Capital among other things. We talked about the thriving tech scene in St. Louis and the synergy created when a meeting at Holton’s office formed VentureSTL.

Cultivation Capital is back in the news again as they’ve announced their two most recent investments. Cultivation Capital’s principals include Holton, along with Square co-founder Jim Mckelvey, Brian Matthews and Peter Esparrage. Back in April we reported on Cultivation Capital’s first three investments, including a $250,000 investment in St.Louis favorite, LockerDome.

In the latest round of investments Cultivation Capital invested $219,000 in Yurbuds a company that makes sports headphones. The company makes earbuds that can withstand the heaviest of workouts. In fact at the International Consumer Electronics back in January, Yurbuds had acrobats walking on their hands while the earbuds stayed firmly in their ears. To prove that there was no PR hocus pocus on-lookers were encouraged to open brand new packs of the earbuds for the acrobats to use. Yes they were awesome.

The other startup to receive funding from Cultivation Capital was Systematic Revenue. While not as sexy as earbuds that won’t fall out of your ears, Systematic Revenue is an online automated marketing solution to help track potential clients. Back in May the startup reported that they had 25 businesses signed up in their beta test.

Systematic Revenue received $100,000 from Cultivation Capital.

“We look forward to assisting the vibrant Yurbuds team and the calculated Systematic Revenue teams as they continue to define St. Louis as an entrepreneurial hub,” saidCliff Holekamp, a general partner of Cultivation Capital, in a statement.

Cultivation Capital plans to invest $500,000 in the most promising startups in the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 classes of Capital Innovators.

Linkage:

Here’s Cultivation Capital’s website

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Austin Startup: VolunteerSpot Raises $1.5 Million From Nebraska New York & More

Whether you’re in charge of volunteers at a school’s PTA, your local church, civic organization or even the boy scouts, organizing volunteers can quickly turn into a big mess. Everyone typically means well when you first call out for volunteers and you end up with more than you need. Then, when it gets to be crunch time, people are too busy with other things or forget what their volunteer job was. This can lead to a chaotic mess for any volunteer coordinator or event organizer. Until recently, even the most organized of volunteer coordinators often pulled off a great event with a gigantic headache.

Karen Bantuveris, the founder and CEO of VolunteerSpot said enough was enough and took this problem into her own hands. She solved it by creating an online platform to manage volunteers. The service has taken off with over 1.5 million volunteer users already using the free platform. What’s even better is the fact that there’s been no real marketing. The startup has survived off word-of-mouth advertising and some social media.

Last week VolunteerSpot announced that they’ve raised $1.5 million dollars in a round of funding that they plan to use to bolster their marketing efforts.

The round was led by FF Venture Capital out of New York. The Central Texas Angel Network, the Baylor Angel Network and Angel List also participated in the round. But those aren’t the only angels Bantuveris was able to woo.

The Nebraska Angels ponied up $450,000 in the round. 14 of the Nebraska Angels contributed $25,000 or more towards that $450,000. Nebraska Angels Vice President Steve Clinch told SiliconPrairieNews that he liked Bentuveris from the minute he picked her up from the airport because of her “go-getter” spirit.

“We like to look at scalability. Does it have that?” Clinch said. “VolunteerSpot, from my investment standpoint — and I think I speak for a lot of other angel investors — does.”

Bart Dillashaw, President of the Nebraska Angels told SPN “The Nebraska Angels are excited about the investment in VolunteerSpot. VolunteerSpot provides a fantastic service to an attractive demographic, and we were incredibly encouraged by the strong loyalty and support of their users.”

“Until this point, we’ve grown almost entirely by word of mouth,” said Bantuveris told the Austin Statesman. “Now, with formal marketing money, we’ll be able to reach a wider group of power moms, teachers and community coordinators who drive the lion’s share of volunteer activities in this country.”

VolunteerSpot is one of the most scalable startups we’ve seen in quite sometime. Every kind of organization from gymnastics clubs to habitat for humanity can, and do use VolunteerSpot, and of course there are volunteer organizations in every town, city and state in the U.S.

Linkage:

Check out Volunteerspot here

Source: SiliconPrairieNews, Austin Statesman

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Baltimore Startup: SocialToaster Grabs $1.975M In Series A Round

Baltimore startup Social Toaster seems to be on the cutting edge of monetizing social media distribution. There are a lot of companies in the same space as Social Toaster but none some to be executing with the same results.

The concept is pretty simple. If you have are a digital publisher or major brand Social Toaster helps you register ambassadors and super fans. These people are charged with helping to get your message out to the world, and because their fans, they do just that. Ambassadors and Super Fans are the type of social media folks who carry a lot of weight. How much?

Well according to Social Toaster’s CEO and Founder Brian Razzaque, “One of our clients told us that with 60,000 ambassadors, we were more effective than their Facebook page of 2 million.” he told the Baltimore Sun

In fact, one of Social Toasters clients is the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens use Social Toaster for monthly media sharing contests which help their content go viral.

This isn’t a fly by night operation or a flash in the pan. Social Toaster has been perfecting their craft. Last year their sales were $300,000 this year they are projecting $2 to $3 million in sales. That’s why Razzaque was able to announce last week that the firm had completed a $1.975 million dollar series A round.

The round follows a seed round in 2011 from Neuberger Ventures and other individual investors.

Blu Venture Investors led Social Toaster’s latest round, Baltimore Angels, Wasabi Ventures, and Piedmont Investment Advisors also participated.

Razzaque plans to double the headcount from 22-50 and also plans moving the company to larger offices to Clipper Mill with about three times the office space they are currently operating out of.

William Militello, Founder of Piedmont Investment Advisors, LLC commented, “I am always excited to fund great entrepreneurs. I believe that true innovation occurs when skilled labor, intellectual capital, and entrepreneurs with great ideas are combined with the financial capital Piedmont can provide.”

Paul Silber of Blu Venture Investors, said, “our team was really attracted to SocialToaster’s novel “message amplification” solution, to the company’s leadership, and to the fact that they were rapidly gaining traction with recognizable name-brand customers. We liked the fact that their software solution offered a cost-effective and simple way for organizations of all kinds to effectively use social media to get their message out to a wider audience.”

Linkage:

For more info on Social Toaster visit them here at socialtoaster.com

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Source: Baltimore Sun

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Kansas City Startup: AgLocal Raises $1 Million Dollar Seed Round

We told you about Kansas City startup AgLocal back in April. This innovative startup is connecting meat lovers with real meat, direct from the farm, effectively cutting out the middle man which is commonly the grocery store.

Real true meat lovers want to make sure they have the highest quality cuts of meat without the worry of chemicals involved in processing or trickery used to make the cut weigh more with additives and such that are commonly found in meat packaged at national food chains.

While the vegans and vegetarians of the world may not like the idea behind the Fairway, KS based startup, farmers love it. According to the Kansas City Business Journal, AgLocal has already signed up over 100 farms to be part of it’s direct to consumer network.

Founder Naithan Jones is hoping to grow AgLocal organically (no pun intended) and sees a vision where anyone in the US can pick up their mobile phone and use an AgLocal app to get the best meat delivered to their door.

AgLocal has secured a $1 million dollar seed round led by local investors OpenAir Equity Partners.

Jones left the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundations Aspiring Entrepreneur FastTrac Program to undertake starting AgLocal.

Jones plans on using the money to add more engineers, build out it’s technology platform and increase partnerships with local farmers.

Linkage:

For more on AgLocal visit them here

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Boulder Startup: LinkSmart Comes Out Of Stealth Mode, Reports $4.7M In Funding

A Boulder startup that promises online publishers a better, smarter way to handle link management, has emerged from the secrecy of “stealth mode”.

LinkSmart announced their concept and product to the yesterday along with the fact that the startup has raised $4.7 million since starting the company in 2009.

LinkSmart’s venture backing comes from Boulder’s The Foundry Group as well as two Silicon Valley area venture groups, Sutter Hill and Costanoa.

Founder and CEO Pete Sheinbaum comes from an online publishing background. He was previously the founder and publisher of DailyCandy.

Text link advertising can be a lucrative source of income, especially for independent online publishers.

Companies like Kontera offer publishers link based advertising that serves up a mini popup hover ad over keywords. One of the pain points with services like these are that readers click out of a website to the ad supported content.

This is just one of the examples of the many things Sheinbaum and the LinkSmart team have been working on since 2009.

“I wanted to build a system for publishers, by a publisher, that satisfies the real business problems” they have with traffic management, user engagement and advertising, Sheinbaum said to the DailyCamera

LinkSmart’s Total Link Management is a SaaS (software as a service) that analyzes readers behavior on websites to serve and suggest more relevant links and keyword suggestions.

This is just the beginning for LinkSmart though they’ve moved into larger office space and plan on working on more publisher centric products and features.

Linkage:

Check out LinkSmart on their website here

Source: DailyCamera

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Pittsburgh Startup: DuoLingo Gets Investment From Ashton Kutcher

Pittsburgh startup DuoLingo has just announced a $3.3 million dollar round of funding led by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures along with actor turned tech investor Ashton Kutcher.. This article in the Post Gazette said Kutcher made this investment personally and no reference is made to his VC firm A-Grade investments.

Kutcher is known to journey outside the borders of Silicon Valley with his tech investments. He heavily vets his investments for game changing technologies. Kutcher recently invested in Des Moines mobile payment startup Dwolla. Although Kutcher hails from the same area, it was more about the technology, and the entrepreneur rather than just being from the same area.

With DuoLingo it’s obviously about the technology and the work that scientist/co-founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker have put into the startup so far.

DuoLingo is a translation software. Although there are a few very technical articles about DuoLingo’s technology, to put it into layman’s terms DuoLingo provides a platform for real life translation. While Google translate can be great for a straight up word for word translation, DuoLingo and their algorithms translate pages on the internet, in a more “real world” conversational way.

When you’re doing the real-world stuff, such as reading a news report in German or French, you really feel like you’re accomplishing something,” von Ahn said in a press release. “It reinforces why you’re working to understand this new language.”

While DuoLingo is great for translation they also enter an element of education as well. As the Post Gazette explains:

Users can scroll over words if they need clues for their translations, and the program automatically detects blatant errors. The site also is designed to track words or concepts that give users trouble and to focus on those for future lessons.

The next phase of DuoLingo includes adding a document translator to it’s already existing web based platform for commercial uses. To get to this point DuoLingo used a pretty extensive beta testing process where von Ahn reports that the beta testers translated tens of millions of sentences.

By crowd sourcing the translations the software is able to pick up the most commonly used translations and achieve better accuracy.

Von Ahn is a 33 year old junior professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned the honor of A. Nico Habermann associate professor of computer science. That’s an honor given to a distinguished junior professor every three years.

If you think that you’ve heard von Ahn’s name before it’s because you probably have. In 2007 von Ahn created the puzzle identifying system Captcha, the system used to verify that a human is filling out most forms. He sold that company to Google for an undisclosed sum.

von Ahn’s other credits include inventing “human computation” which is a form of crowd-sourcing humans to help computers solve problems that are beyond the technology.

von Ahn said that his goal with DuoLingo is to form a universally readable internet.

Linkage:

For more on this visit the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Curious about Ashton Kutcher’s investments visit his Crunchbase Profile here

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Colorado Startup: Mile High Organics Closes Seven Figure Round

Boulder Colorado startup Mile High Organics has announced that they’ve closed a seven million figure seed round. The exact number wasn’t reported. However, there are some big names in the round including Dave McClure’s 500 startups and TA Venture of Kiev Ukraine. Mile High Organics will use th money to expand it’s high quality, cost-competitive grocery deliver service with new products and services.

We recently featured Mile High Organics in one of our stories about trending angel.co startups from “everywhere else”.

“The key difference between Mile High Organics and other grocer services is that we emphasize quality of product and service while being price competitive,” said Mile High Organics CEO Michael Joseph. “Part of the reason we are able to do this is by distributing to Colorado’s entire Front Range through one distribution center — as opposed to dozens of stores.”

While grocery delivery services are hardly new, Mile High Organics is more like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s delivery, or even perhaps your neighborhood grocery co-op delivery rather than a huge supermarket. Online grocery services have been experiencing a huge surge. A recent Nielsen survey showed that consumers spent $12 billion in online grocery services since 2010. That figure is expected to more than double to $25 billion by 2014. In 2011 the online grocery service industry as a whole did $35 billion in sales

Despite a weak economy, Mile High Organics has seen tremendous growth since its launch in June 2010. The company employs 40 people and is currently hiring several more positions. It allows its customers to incorporate fresh, organic food into their diet for their best health and best life. In just less than two years, the company has achieved recurring orders by delighting thousands of members. Mile High Organics recently became the first U.S. Department of Agriculture certified organic online retailer, solidifying their industry leadership and consumer trust.

“We see Mile High Organics emerging as an important player in the online grocery industry,” said David McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups. “They are disrupting the $600 billion grocery industry in the United States.”

“Mile High Organics is an innovative player serving the largest consumer market in the United States, focusing on local organic food products and minimization of environmental impact,” said Viktoriya Tigipko, managing director of TA Venture. “The company is developing a truly disruptive e-grocery model to compete for the burgeoning natural and organic grocery market. We are very excited about our investment in Mile High Organics and are confident that the company is uniquely positioned and capable of becoming a leading player in the U.S. organic grocery delivery market and expanding its business to other countries.”

Mile High Organics now offers more than 600 grocery products, with an emphasis on providing as much local, seasonal organic produce and groceries as possible. It is the only Colorado retailer that supplies completely non-genetically modified foods, free from synthetic pesticides and chemical inputs.

Linkage:

Find out more about Mile High Organics Here

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Cleveland Startup Organization Jump Start Receives $250,000 To Spur Development Of Women,Minority and Inner City Startups

The JumpStart organization in Cleveland Ohio is a non profit organization looking to help startups across the country. While Startup America does a great job on a broader scale, JumpStart focuses on women, minority and inner city based entrepreneurship. JumpStart is also a member and partner with Startup America.

The $250,000 grant came from the Surdha Foundation one of the nation’s oldest and largest family foundations. The foundation is headquartered in New York City and was founded in 1917 by John Emory Andrus, a successful New York businessman who served four terms in congress.

“Through our Strong Local Economies program, we aim to create robust and sustainable economies that include a diversity of businesses and sectors, improved access to quality jobs and opportunities for economic mobility. We are proud to support JumpStart in its efforts to expand this valuable program,” said Surdna’s president, Phillip W. Henderson.

“Minority and women entrepreneurs growing larger scale firms can contribute meaningfully to the country’s economic output by becoming more significant job creators,” says Darrin Redus, JumpStart’s Chief Economic Inclusion Officer. “With Surdna’s help, JumpStart can continue to develop and share inclusion best practices and make key connections that will help speed the growth, market entry and success of these high potential young companies.”

Along with the Knight Foundation, the charitable foundation that is the legacy of the Jack and Jim Knight, the brothers who started the Knight Ridder newspaper empire, Surdha is a founding partner of Jumpstart Inc.

Linkage:

Find out more about Jumpstart here

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Cornell University Startup: Empire Robotics Wins Five Minute Pitch Contest

A robotics startup founded by Cornell University students in Ithaca New York took home the top spot in the recent Worcester PolyTechnic Institutes Venture Forum Five Minute Pitch Contest.

The young entrepreneurs are hoping to develop their robotic gripper technology, think those wild orange gripper things, that functions robotically.

According to the Worcester Business Journal
The gripper is a ball-shaped elastic membrane filled with granular material attached to a robotic arm. The air pressure inside the ball is manipulated to adjust the softness or hardness of the gripper, allowing it to conform around and squeeze objects.
This exactly the kind of tech that’s missing for bringing more agile manufacturing to the United States, to automate manufacturing lines in the United States, and that’s exactly what we intend to do with this patent pending technology,” John Amend, the company’s chief technology officer told a roomful of businesspeople, investors and others gathered in the school’s campus center Tuesday evening.

The team took home a prize of $2500. While they aren’t breaking the bank with that kind of prize money, they are getting invaluable exposure from the investor community.

A company called SafeSiren which makes a safety device for school students took home the second pace prize. Other ideas presented included a better way to sterilize catheters, an energy management system for hotels and a blue tooth device designed to replace hearing aids. Check out the source link below for more on those companies.

Source: Worcester Business Journal